An Questioning Voice: Instructors and Basic Writers Interact

Abstract

Ten years have passed since Mina Shaughnessy explained Errors and Expectations that the real job of the writing teacher is not to correct students' mistakes but to see the of them and to harness that intelligence the service of learning (11). Since then, we have come a good distance our thinking-or at least our theorizing. We know that the intelligence behind students' errors represents a struggle to express equally intelligent meaning, and that complex thoughts are easily derailed by lapses the academic code. As Nancy Sommers says, many of us formerly read with our preconceptions and preoccupations, expecting to find and, therefore, misread our students' texts (154). By only correcting errors, many of us reinforced the notion that rightness is all, and we helped reticent writers become blocked writers; nothing could be written right, so nothing was written. The prose that overcorrected students managed to squeeze out, they protected; they believed that change meant correction, and many corrections meant many errors. In recent years, writing programs nationwide have begun to meet the challenge of convincing inexperienced writers that writing is revising, and that revising is more than the correction of an error-riddled essay. Today we hope to free students from the fear of error, while we still foster a respect for good, clear prose. We now encourage students to rethink their own work independently-within bounds of convention that must be taught and learned. Teaching is not looking for errors, but it is not overlooking them either. We have to sense when to allow error in the